Your AI agent needs a sandbox key
An AI coding assistant sent you here because it's integrating ElasticPay and needs a test credential. This takes about two minutes and involves no real money.
Three steps
Create a free account
Email and password. No credit card, no sales call, no business details yet — those are only needed later, when you want to accept real payments.
Set up your sandbox
One short form creates your sandbox account. Sandbox is a full copy of the platform that moves no real money, so nothing you or your agent does here can charge anyone.
Copy your sandbox key
You land on Developer → API Keys. Click Reveal on the sandbox secret key, copy it, and paste it back to your agent. It starts with sk_sandbox_.
Is this safe?
A sandbox key can't move money. It only works against test data: test cards, simulated bank transfers, and a clock your agent can fast-forward to watch recurring billing play out. Nothing it does reaches a real customer or a real bank account.
Share the key that starts with sk_sandbox_ and nothing else. Live keys — the ones that begin sk_live_ — move real money, and no agent, tool, or person should ever ask you for one. If something asks for a live key, that's a red flag.
What happens after
Your agent builds and tests the integration against sandbox — creating customers, taking test payments, setting up payment plans, and verifying the results. You can watch it happen in the dashboard.
When you're ready to accept real payments, going live is a separate, deliberate step: a short business verification, then live keys issued to you — never to an agent. Pricing is published on the pricing page; there's no setup fee and no lock-in.
Or skip the key: connect over MCP
ElasticPay runs a hosted MCP server, so an agent that speaks MCP doesn't need a pasted key at all. Add mcp.elasticpay.co/mcp/sandbox to your agent, approve the connection in your browser, and it's connected to a sandbox account that looks and behaves exactly like the real thing, minus the money. Connect guide.
From there the whole loop is the agent's to run. It creates a customer, saves a test card, takes a payment, sets up a recurring plan, then fast-forwards a test clock a month and watches the renewal fire, the payment go through, and the webhook events arrive, the same events your production code will listen for. Instead of a build you hope works, you get a build the agent has already proved works, end to end, before a single real dollar is involved. See the loop.
It doesn't stop at building. Once you're live, the same server offers a read-only live connection: your support or reconciliation agent can answer "why did this payment fail?" against your real account under a grant that can't create, change, refund, or move anything, and that you can revoke from the dashboard at any time. A payments platform your agent can operate from day one. How live read-only works.
Bring your customers with you
The hardest part of switching payment providers was never the code. It's the customer base: thousands of records, the plans they're on, and the cards and bank accounts you're not allowed to touch. ElasticPay is built so that moving them is something you approve, not something you do.
Point your agent at your old platform's export and it stages a complete customer and payment plan import over MCP: every row checked before anything is created, frozen into a single fingerprinted manifest, and put in front of you in the dashboard. What you see is exactly what runs. Approve it and watch the progress; stop it mid-run if something looks wrong; roll it back afterwards if you change your mind. The agent that proposed it can do none of those things, only you can. How agent-driven migration works.
Capturing customer details is just as simple. Our hosted payment page and embeddable widget collect names, emails, cards, and bank details straight into ElasticPay, tokenised on the way in, so your code, your agent, and your database never see a card number. Saved methods and recurring plans come out the other side ready to charge.
And if your customers' payment details live with your current provider, the ElasticPay team migrates them for you, in or out, through a PCI-compliant transfer between providers. Your customers keep paying without re-entering a card, and you're never locked in: the same door works in both directions. Talk to us about a migration.
Ready to get your agent building?
Create a free account, copy your sandbox key, and paste it back. No credit card, no real money.